It seems the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies study was right: the US is preparing a massive three-day blitz on Iran, with the aim of taking out its entire military:
The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.As with Iraq, what happens after the bombing stops seems to be ignored. Obvious consequences are the utter poisoning of Iranian public opinion against the US (where previously it had been slowly moving in the right direction), and ramming home to small countries their need for nuclear weapons to deter US aggression. There's also a high chance of a wider regional war, or of Iran being reduced to a failed state, with resulting consequences for global security and oil supplies (and you'd expect the US to at least care about the last one). But they probably think they can bomb from on high, destroy what they want, and that everything will go back to normal once they declare "mission accomplished". I think the ongoing resistance to their occupation in Iraq shows the absurdity of that position.Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.
